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OSMnx can now download street network elevation data for anywhere in the world. In one line of code it downloads the elevation in meters of each network node, and in one more line of code it can calculate every street (i.e., edge) grade. Here is the complete street network of San Francisco, California, with nodes colored according to their elevation:

Check out the journal article about OSMnx. This is a summary of some of my recent research on making OpenStreetMap data analysis easy for urban planners. It was also published on the ACSP blog.

OpenStreetMap – a collaborative worldwide mapping project inspired by Wikipedia – has emerged in recent years as a major player both for mapping and acquiring urban spatial data. Though coverage varies somewhat worldwide, its data are of high quality and compare favorably to CIA World Factbook estimates and US Census TIGER/Line data. OpenStreetMap imported the TIGER/Line roads in 2007 and since then its community has made numerous corrections and improvements. In fact, many of these additions go beyond TIGER/Line’s scope, including for example passageways between buildings, footpaths through parks, bike routes, and detailed feature attributes such as finer-grained street classifiers, speed limits, etc.

This presents a fantastic data source to help answer urban planning questions, but OpenStreetMap’s data has been somewhat difficult to work with due to its Byzantine query language and coarse-grained bulk extracts provided by third parties. As part of my dissertation, I developed a tool called OSMnx that allows researchers to download street networks and building footprints for any city name, address, or polygon in the world, then analyze and visualizethem. OSMnx democratizes these data and methods to help technical and non-technical planners and researchers use OpenStreetMap data to study urban form, circulation networks, accessibility, and resilience.

I previously demonstrated how to create figure-ground square-mile visualizations of urban street networks with OSMnx to consistently compare city patterns, design paradigms, and connectivity. OSMnx downloads, analyzes, and visualizes street networks from OpenStreetMap but it can also get building footprints. If we mash-up these building footprints with the street networks, we get a fascinating comparative window into urban form:

The heart of Allan Jacobs’ classic book on street-level urban form and design, Great Streets, features dozens of hand-drawn figure-ground diagrams in the style of Nolli maps. Each depicts one square mile of a city’s street network. Drawing these cities at the same scale provides a revealing spatial objectivity in visually comparing their street networks and urban forms.

We can recreate these visualizations automatically with Python and the OSMnx package, which I developed as part of my dissertation. With OSMnx we can download a street network from OpenStreetMap for anywhere in the world in just one line of code. Here are the square-mile diagrams of Portland, San Francisco, Irvine, and Rome created and plotted automatically by OSMnx:

OSMnx is a Python package for downloading administrative boundary shapes and street networks from OpenStreetMap. It allows you to easily construct, project, visualize, and analyze complex street networks in Python with NetworkX. You can get a city’s or neighborhood’s walking, driving, or biking network with a single line of Python code. Then you can simply visualize cul-de-sacs or one-way streets, plot shortest-path routes, or calculate stats like intersection density, average node connectivity, or betweenness centrality. You can download/cite the paper here.

In a single line of code, OSMnx lets you download, construct, and visualize the street network for, say, Modena Italy:

Check out the journal article about OSMnx, which implements this technique.

A spatial index such as R-tree can drastically speed up GIS operations like intersections and joins. Spatial indices are key features of spatial databases like PostGIS, but they’re also available for DIY coding in Python. I’ll introduce how R-trees work and how to use them in Python and its geopandas library. All of my code is in this notebook in this urban data science GitHub repo.

I started using Foursquare at the end of 2012 and kept with it even after it became the pointless muck that is Swarm. Since I’ve now got 4 years of location history (ie, check-ins) data, I decided to visualize and map it with Python, matplotlib, and basemap. The code is available in this GitHub repo. It’s easy to re-purpose to visualize your own check-in history: you just need to plug in your Foursquare OAuth token then run the notebook.

First the notebook downloads all my check-ins from the Foursquare API. Then I mapped all of them, using matplotlib basemap.

A guide to setting up the Python scientific stack, well-suited for geospatial analysis, on a Raspberry Pi 3. The whole process takes just a few minutes.

The Raspberry Pi 3 was announced two weeks ago and presents a substantial step up in computational power over its predecessors. It can serve as a functional Wi-Fi connected Linux desktop computer, albeit underpowered. However it’s perfectly capable of running the Python scientific computing stack including Jupyter, pandas, matplotlib, scipy, scikit-learn, and OSMnx.

Despite (or because of?) its low power, it’s ideal for low-overhead and repetitive tasks that researchers and engineers often face, including geocoding, web scraping, scheduled API calls, or recurring statistical or spatial analyses (with small-ish data sets). It’s also a great way to set up a simple server or experiment with Linux. This guide is aimed at newcomers to the world of Raspberry Pi and Linux, but who have an interest in setting up a Python environment on these $35 credit card sized computers. We’ll run through everything you need to do to get started (if your Pi is already up and running, skip steps 1 and 2). Continue reading Scientific Python for Raspberry Pi

The fall semester begins next week at UC Berkeley. For the third year in a row, Paul Waddell and I will be teaching CP255: Urban Informatics and Visualization, and this is my first year as co-lead instructor.

This masters-level course trains students to analyze urban data, develop indicators, conduct spatial analyses, create data visualizations, and build interactive web maps. To do this, we use the Python programming language, open source analysis and visualization tools, and public data.

This course is designed to provide future city planners with a toolkit of technical skills for quantitative problem solving. We don’t require any prior programming experience – we teach this from the ground up – but we do expect prior knowledge of basic statistics and GIS.

Update, September 2017: I am no longer a Berkeley GSI, but Paul’s class is ongoing. Check out his fantastic teaching materials in his GitHub repo. From my experiences here, I have developed a cycle of course materials, IPython notebooks, and tutorials towards an urban data science course based on Python, available in this GitHub repo.

This guide was updated in June 2016 to reflect changes to the dependencies and the ability to install with Python wheels.

I recently went through the exercise of installing geopandas on Windows and getting it to run. Having learned several valuable lessons, I thought I’d share them with the world in case anyone else is trying to get this toolkit working in a Windows environment (also see this GitHub gist I put together).

It seems that pip installing geopandas works fine on Linux and Mac. However, several of its dependencies have C extensions that cause compilation failures with pip on Windows. This guide gets around that issue. For preliminaries, I have this working on Windows 7, 8, and 10. My Python environments are Anaconda, 64-bit, with both Python 2.7 and 3.5. I’m running geopandas version 0.2 with GDAL 2.0.2, Fiona 1.7.0, pyproj 1.9.5.1, and shapely 1.5.16.